John had promised to be good.  But as soon as we left he decided that since he felt so very much better, he could break his fast.  He knew how to do this and fortunately for him, (it was very much premature for John to eat) did it more or less correctly, only eating small quantities of raw fruits and vegetables.  But by the time we got back home three days later, John had relapsed.  The pain was rapidly getting much worse; the sores were growing again and a few small new ones appeared.  Dr. Isabelle again took away his food and gave him another verbal spanking a little more severe than the one he’d had a few weeks earlier and put him to bed again without his supper.

After two more weeks on water, John had gained a great deal on the sores.  They were filling in and weren’t oozing pus, looked clean and the new forming meat looked a healthy pink instead of purple-black.  But John had been very slender to start with and by now he was getting near the end of his food reserves.  He probably couldn’t have fasted on water for more than one more week without starvation beginning.  But this time, when he broke his fast, it was under close supervision.  I gave him dilute juice only, introduced other sustenance very cautiously and made absolutely sure that reintroducing nourishment would not permit the organism to gain.  This time it didn’t.  John’s own immune system, beefed up by fasting, had conquered a virulent organism that could have easily killed him.

Before the era of antibiotics, before immunizations to the common childhood illnesses, people frequently died of infections as virulent as the one that attacked John.  They usually died because they “ate to keep up their strength.”  Most of these deaths were unnecessary, caused by ignorance and poor nursing care.  For example, standard medical treatment for typhoid fever used to consist of spoon-fed milk—­sure to kill all but the strongest constitution.  Even without the assistance of massive doses of vitamin C, if people would but fast away infections they could cure themselves of almost all of them with little danger, without the side effects of antibiotics or creating mutated antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

Dr. John Tilden, a hygienist who practiced in the ’20s, before the era of antibiotics, routinely fasted patients with infectious illnesses.  Supporting the sick body with wise nursing, he routinely healed scarlet fever, whopping cough, typhoid, typhus, pneumonia, peritonitis, Rocky Mountain fever, tuberculosis, gonorrhea, syphilis, cholera, and rheumatic fever.  The one common infection he could not cure was diphtheria involving the throat. (Tilden, Impaired Health, Vol.  II).

Recently, medical gerontologists have discovered another reason that fasting heals infections.  One body function that deteriorates during the aging process is the production of growth hormone so the effects of growth hormone have been studied.  This hormone also stimulates the body to heal wounds and burns, repair broken bones, generally replace any tissues that have been destroyed and, growth hormone stimulates the immune response.  Growth hormone also maintains muscle tone and its presence generally slows the aging process.